Would you take a PR to throw an error for all empty configs?

Current behavior:

When using load(null, configPath) cosmiconfig throws an error

When using load(dirPath) cosmiconfig continues to traverse up the directory path

If this was intentional then please help me understand why. Otherwise I would like to create a PR to throw in all cases. I don’t really care whether an error is thrown, we’re mostly looking for a way to differentiate empty configurations from those which are non-existent. e.g. package.json with an empty prettier property should behave differently from a package.json without a prettier property.

Edit: I was basing the above off of issue comments I was reading in the prettier repo - not off of local tests. When cosmiconfig sees a package.json file with "prettier": {}, it correctly returns an empty object and does not traverse up the file tree. However it still treats an empty *rc file as non-existent. I now understand this is an edge case that really can really only help expose configuration errors made by developers.

Why

prettier-atom would like to allow users to specify settings within the plugin for one-off cases where files do not belong to projects. However if any configuration is found, even empty then we would like to use that configuration instead. Empty signifying default settings.

[sudo-suhas]

@olsonpm, When loading a specified file, the behavior was inconsistent if the file was empty(see https://github.com/davidtheclark/cosmiconfig/pull/78#issuecomment-318810892) and this was fixed in v3.0.0. However, when performing a search up the directory tree, I am not entirely sure that we should throw an error when we find an empty config file.

package.json with an empty prettier property should behave differently from a package.json without a prettier property.

If the pkg has an empty property, the search resolves with {}. The same is true for a JSON file with {} as the contents. So would it be enough to check if the value that cosmiconfig search resolves to, is an empty object?

resolve to empty cfg

package.json:

{
  "name": "prettier-pkg-empty-cfg",
  "version": "1.0.0",
  "description": "",
  "main": "index.js",
  "scripts": {
    "test": "echo \"Error: no test specified\" && exit 1"
  },
  "keywords": [],
  "author": "",
  "license": "ISC",
  "devDependencies": {
    "prettier": "^1.10.2"
  },
  "prettier": {}
}

λ node
> let prettier = require('prettier')
> let filepath = path.resolve('./index.js')
'E:\\Projects\\experiments\\prettier-pkg-empty-cfg\\index.js'
> prettier.resolveConfig(filepath).then(console.log);
> {}

[davidtheclark]

Empty configs are now handled consistently in the v5 branch, so closing this issue.